Blazes, Heat Stroke, and Budding Romance
by SlytherinFlame
Summary: Maxie/Courtney impulse for the entirety of the fire-grasping world to look on and enjoy. Oneshot. Loveliness.


_Just a little Maxie/Courtney action to wet the pallet. It was a very short, very impulsive piece. Manga-verse...game-verse...eh, a mix of the verses, actually. I'm not sure. I just started writing and pyromaniac goodness just came spilling out on the keyboard. It was a tough clean-up to make sense of it all, but there you go. _

_Dante references. Hells yeah. _

_Insert the usual disclaimer here. Ho hum._

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><p><strong>Blazes. Heat stroke. Budding romance.<strong>

She lived in a bubble gum fortress, built walls up through a façade of arrogance and masculinity. She watched women fly by like Swellow, sending by gentle, little breezes, enough to put out her dying match at last. Lit no more.

She owned tattoos, markings, _vanity_. She thought they were beautiful, but he saw the troubles of charred, black masses coating her flesh. Everything was overdone in hideous dark ink; blackness might have totally engulfed infected skin. He worried about her, poisoning and plying, playing dead but only for hours. She smoked when she ran out of pink Bubble Yum. He hated it, despite being a smoker himself, found a disgrace to him in the puffs of squalor, in the divet she lived in for so much of her life.

She loved and lost, and then loved and lost again. No luck, gamble, pay out, fall to the ground still shrouded in that thick cloud of cigarette smoke that obscured her personality and did all the talking. He inhaled her, watched in sobriety because the minute she fell was the minute he couldn't drown sorrow in the drink of reality.

She said she saw stars during the day time, her affinity for fury, for fire, for passion. She was never quite right, he knew, with her thick black hair in its short bob, her pale porcelain skin, and her emerald eyes. Maybe she was only the ashes that remained, thrown about by too many raging seasons.

He told her to get back up, but it was all hacking fits now. When he grabbed her, smoke simply slipped through his fingers and he couldn't get a proper grip on her burgundy sweatshirt, even though he was no stranger to burning either. Mania. High-pitched wails that stuck in throats like a fly in its paper.

He knew she wasn't watching him. That's why he kept this up, desperate under a dream, any dream that could distort his billowing life, so hopeless, so hapless.

He had hair the color of campfire and he too had skin the color of the finest china, with hands that fit around hers so well. Longing to step into the inferno, spitting, swearing into night air, turning back into nothingness, and reborn again to emerald irises, clear, bright, no longer veiled in the scent of stale tobacco.

Some dreams never ignite. So pop went another bubble when he confiscated her addiction. She wanted to rise as phoenix again, but he clipped her wings without realizing it, caged her, drank reality to disable the burning in his vision. He wanted to strip her of the ugly tattoos that she so prized when they turned men off like light bulbs. Burnt out like her last lighter, living for the night when he gave her one candle, white and short, wick broken in half. He meant no harm, but he sure as _hell_ had an odd way of showing it.

A growing conflagration.** Circle Seven: Round Three.** If they were heretics, choking in their coffins through a charcoal-stained existence would be in pride. He would hold her all the while, and she'd wriggle away like a salamander.

To bring the heat, the sweat, flush of skin when the tips of flames licked her cheek… burns, new tattoos to add to her collection. Entropy this time, that's what she called the false henna, as if bones could really play the oracle.

Hatchlings of arson, of run-down wooden shacks and gasoline, of running away and permanently discoloring the skin of their palms, of water evaporating on the spot and the absence of tiny hairs on volcanic faces. So molten, she thought it was ice in the crater, in her house, asleep in her bed and wafting through dreamless slumber. She didn't always know he was there next to her, the charmer, the grasper, the stalker. He made his immortal decision when she was comatose.

She would wake to his coughs and his smell; become flustered, backing away, throwing on a different sweatshirt in the same flat color of his eyes. She'd run out by herself, but never bother to put out the blaze in her trail. Unconsciously, he would always follow a path of scorched woodchips.

Roses may bud, but she'd suffocate them in magma as he looked on in endothermic interest. With a smack of pink bubble gum, coordinates known and grown, a gamble, a fall, and the torch blown out again, she was accepting his pocket lighter once more when hers failed.


End file.
